It is a common sight to see a large number of ordinary basket-type shopping carts in parking lots ready to be collected and pushed back to the store to be reused by customers. Typically it takes one to three people to push these carts in single file nestled together back to the store due to the unwieldy length and weight of the large number of carts. The job of returning the line of shopping carts to the store had been almost exclusively a manual task due to the unavailability of equipment. Regular forklifts were thought to be too large and incapable of adequately coupling to the line of carts in addition to being too large to fit through the store doors. Recently, some powered means have been developed to assist in the process. However, all of the known prior art suffers from disadvantages which are addressed by the present invention, primarily the coupling means which acts as an interface between the powered pushing device and the line of carts or whatever is being manipulated.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,439,069 issued to Beeler on Aug. 8, 1995 discloses a powered pusher vehicle for moving a train of nested shopping carts. The vehicle having a main body portion with a central drive wheel powered by an electric motor through a worm gear transmission. The vehicle includes a pair of latch members for automatically connecting the front of the vehicle to a rearmost one of the nested carts.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,573,078 issued to Stringer et al. on Nov. 12, 1996 discloses a steerable, self-powered device for use in towing and guiding a number of shopping carts attached together.
The art referred to and/or described above is not intended to constitute an admission that any patent, publication or other information referred to herein is "prior art" with respect to this invention. In addition, this section should not be construed to mean that a search has been made or that no other pertinent information as defined in 37 C.F.R. .sctn.1.56(a) exists.